Abstract

This study focuses on the acoustic patterns of stop consonants and adjacent vowels as they develop in young children (ages 2;6‐3;3) over a six month period. Over forty different acoustic measurements were made on each utterance, including durational, amplitude, spectral, formant, and harmonic measurements. These acoustic data are interpreted in terms of the supraglottal, laryngeal, and respiratory actions that give rise to them. Data show that some details of the child’s gestures are still far from achieving the adult pattern. Significant findings include a high number of bursts in children’s stop productions, possibly due to greater compliance of the active articulator. The incidence of multiple bursts decreases over the period of the study. Measurements of the burst spectra show that the production of all three places of articulation is close to normal. Finally, children’s voiced stop productions display a delayed onset of voicing for all three places of articulation, indicating difficulty with coordination of closure of the glottis and release of the primary articulator. This measurement is found to decrease toward adult values over six months. Analysis of longitudinal data on young children will result in better models of the development of motor speech production. [Work supported by NIH grant DC00075.]